Blurhy's page

When it comes to Pathfinder and Paizo in general, I've been playing PF for about 5-6 years in non-organized play. I've been both DM and player, and I've run a handful of Paizo's modules and adventure paths in Golarion as well as whole campaigns in homebrew settings. I have almost every Player Companion, Campaign Setting, and Core Rulebook (not so much on the modules or APs), and I love to troll through them over-and-over. What can I say? I'm a lore aficionado... and I've spent more time that I care to admit reading up on the most pointless tidbits of lore. It's just who I am - an occasionally obsessive pedant.

When it comes to Starfinder, I hope to be quick on the pick up, since I do have experience with PF and I bought nearly every single SF book as soon as it was available. That includes the CRB, the pre-season SFS quests, the Dead Suns AP: Part 1, the First Contact primer, and so on. That said, I have yet to actually play in a session of Starfinder (woe is me!), and I made a vow to only open up the adventures/modules if I were to DM. With all that, I'm incredibly impatient to finally dive in and play an SF session.

When it comes to Play-by-Post, I'm not entirely new. Starting back in middle school (about 9-10 years ago!) I began my adventures in writing and roleplay by joining a popular online forum dedicated entirely to roleplaying (esp. PbP roleplaying). Since then, I've roleplayed in dozens of settings and games and campaigns, and I even started taking up the hobby of writing and worldbuilding back in high school. And since then, I've developed the skill set of character and world development through the aforementioned means and more (professional theatre and improv experience, writing clases at my university, practice and more practice, etc.).

All that said, I'm still new to official SFS PbP. Despite what the case I've made for myself, I'm green as can be.

That's why I've gone through the Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Guide and the various helpful resources floating around (from GMHmm's PbP GM kit [for the awesome copy-paste character sheet] to Painlord's Advanced PbP guide to Paizo's FAQs).

What I mean to say through my big monologue is two things:
- I'm optimistic and confident that I shouldn't suck too terribly.
- I'm itching to finally play SF because omgplswhycantibeinspacerightnowwithstrawberrymachinecakeplshelp.

Introduction
Okay, so we all know Pharasma detests undead of any type. The reason for it is plainly stated that it's because the undead are aberrations to the cycle of life and death. But I'mma about to learn ya somethin'.

An Overview of Pharasma and the Soul's Journey
Pharasma is officially the deity of "fate, death, prophecy, and birth" (Campaign Setting; Inner Sea World Guide). In practice, she has three roles: midwife, prophet, and reaper (Inner Sea World Guide). Her main duties are focused on shepherding souls through the cycle of life and death, protecting these souls, and judging souls to send them to the appropriate afterlife (Inner Sea World Guide; Gods and Magic). The motive behind her roles are unknown though.

To be clear, the cycle for a soul is thus (Mummy’s Mask: Temple of the Sky Pharaoh; The Great Beyond: A Guide to the Multiverse; Occult Adventures):

• You, a soul, inhabit a mortal vessel.
  
• You are born.
  
• You live life.
  
• You die.
  
• You make your way to Pharasma's Boneyard for judgement via the River of Souls.
  
• You get sent to your most appropriate afterlife and spend your afterlife there (but often only after having fulfilled your destiny; if you haven’t, you’re usually resurrected).
  
• You become an outsider, petitioner, and/or a part of the planes themselves.
  
• You are inevitably swallowed by the Maelstrom.
  
• You are dissolved into unaligned quintessence - an energy of nothing.
  
• You, as energy, stream back to the Positive Energy Plane.
  
• You are cultivated into an unaligned soul by the jyoti and manasaputra.
  
• You inhabit a new mortal vessel and are eventually born again, but at this point, you're not who you originally were anymore.

Going through the complete cycle of life-death-life is basically a variation on reincarnation, and it could take any variable amount of countless years for one individual to go through the whole process (Mummy’s Mask: Temple of the Sky Pharaoh; Occult Adventures).

But now let’s talk about the Lady of Graves.

A Deeper Look at the Lady of Graves
Pharasma is somber and dour, cold and stern (Inner Sea Gods; Faiths of Balance). Lore says that "having seen infants die, the righteous fall too soon, and tyrants live to advanced age, she makes no judgment about the justness of a particular death, and welcomes each birth with equal severity” (Inner Sea Gods). She also has a different perspective when it comes to people. It’s said that “she has seen tyrants prosper and the innocent weep, and is necessarily amoral, yet she has also seen people dramatically over their lives, and thus withholds judgment until a mortal’s death” (Faiths of Balance). Pharasma isn't heartless so much as she’s both desensitized because she’s seen it all and aware that people change. As such, she's relatively apathetic about most things moral, ethical, or otherwise.

Additionally, Pharasma doesn't necessarily care about one's life and death so much, in terms of what one does or how they live their life. What one does in life is just used to judge the soul (Faiths of Balance; Inner Sea Gods; The Great Beyond: A Guide to the Multiverse). This is one reason she's classified as True Neutral.

And though she doesn’t care about morals or ethics as we think of them, she does care about undeath because it attempts to usurp the great cycle of death, life, and fate. As lore says, she views it as a “corruption of a soul’s path on a journey to her judgement” (Inner Sea Gods). Still, it’s clear that “she allows resurrection”, so it’s not just taking a soul out of the River of Souls that bothers her (Inner Sea Gods); it’s when someone is removed from the cycle entirely and kept from judgement that she is upset.

Moving on, Pharasma really only has three rules for her followers (Inner Sea Gods; Faiths of Balance):

• Do not kill her servitors, like the psychopomps.
  
• Do not partake in abortion.
  
• Do not create undead.

Other that that, she's lax about anything else, even general necromancy—I mean, she has special followers called "white necromancers" (Faiths of Balance; Inner Sea Gods).

Additionally, she doesn't outright demand the destruction of individual undead creatures. The most passionate she gets is she "encourages her followers to hunt undead, as the souls of the destroyed undead will then reach her for judgement” (Inner Sea Gods).

She encourages but doesn’t demand undead hunting. This is reflected in the statement that she’s merely "stern observer of life and death" (Inner Sea Gods). Also, she doesn't care how one hunts undead—slay it, help it rest, or whatever else. In fact, she never provides explicit instruction on how to combat the undead, but she does provide instruction on how to prevent undeath in her holy book, The Bones Land in a Spiral (Inner Sea Gods).

She wants to preserve the cycle, and the means taken to do this don’t matter—just as I described above when discussing her neutrality.

What is unknown then is why she wants to preserve the cycle.

Why It's Not Just For the Sake of Life, Death, and Anti-Undeath
It can't just be to protect the cycle from undeath, which works against the cycle, for lore says that "Pharasma also sometimes allows the spirits of those who have died under mysterious conditions to transmit short messages to their living kin to comfort them, expose a murderer, or haunt an enemy" (Campaign Setting; Inner Sea World Guide). In other words, she sometimes voluntarily allows souls to interact with the material plane—albeit temporarily. This is also seen in the fated guide Spiritualists who “bond to spirits who have been judged and allowed to return to Golarion to complete some vital task” (Occult Origins). And any sort of spirit/spiritual interaction on the material plane is classified as undead/undeath.

Considering the fact that ‘no undead’ seems to be on of her few hard-and-fast rule, there seems to be another important facet to her maintaining of the cycle that can sometimes overrule the “no undead” tenant.

So then what it could it be? Well, this is where we step even deeper into the realm of conjecture.

Fate, Prophecy, and Why Pharasma Cares
I think it’s a form of selfishness, and the reason for this is because I believe Pharasma has been feeling threatened and—for lack of better word—insecure.

See, the cycle as a whole is supposedly preordained. Even other gods view is as untouchable (The Great Beyond: A Guide to the Multiverse). It’s an absolute, a very real thing, and those that mess with the cycle are not only trespassing on her role as reaper and midwife but her role as prophet. It’s this prophet role that I want to focus on because it has changed dramatically.

As it is now, her role as prophet has weakened in the current age. Prophecy has declined in accuracy (Inner Sea Gods; Faiths of Balance). This happened after the death—or supposed death—of the Human God Aroden, who was prophesied to make a great return but instead disappeared (Occult Mysteries; Campaign Setting; Inner Sea World Guide). This threw Golarion into turmoil and marked the new age: the Age of Lost Omens (Campaign Setting; Inner Sea World Guide).

Now, fate as a concept may still exist. There are still a lot of things that are seemingly preordained—e.g. Groteus’ consumption of all in the end times or the existence of the reanimated medium which mentions “sometimes a departed soul destined for legend gains a second chance at life by possessing his own revived body” (Inner Sea Gods; Occult Adventures; Shattered Star: Beyond the Doomsday Door). Moreover, it’s written that Pharasma “can read the patterns and is said to know the gate of every life as it enters the world, she also understands the inconsistency of prophecy, and holds such knowledge close to her cheat, maintaining the idea (or illusion) of free will” (Faiths of Balance). If free will is an illusion or even an idea that must be maintained, that supposes some kind of destiny or fate.

However, fate has weakened to some extent. This is evidenced by individuals like those learned adepts who live many lives by submerging themselves in the Lake of Mortal Reflections located in the Boneyard and can choose their own fates (Occult Adventures).

Many think prophecy is over. This has been proven by many IC events, like Pharasmin seers going mad, and even OOC mechanics—divinations spells only have some percentage of success (Inner Sea Gods; Core Rulebook). Some people even think that Pharasma has lost the ability to clearly divine the future, although no one knows for sure (Inner Sea World Guide).

Besides birth and death, two other things are just as important for Pharasma—fate and prophecy (Campaign Setting; Inner Sea Gods). These four things make up her areas of concern—quite literally, the things she’s concerned of and concerned with.

It's written that she "scrutinize[es] the tangled webs of fate and prophecy", and that "those who die before experiencing their full fate might be lucky enough to return in this life or the next, either spontaneously or by getting called home by resurrection magic, but more often those who feel that they've met an untimely end discover that their destiny was in fact always leading them to their particular moment of death, however unjust or ignoble” (Inner Sea Gods).

This is why I believe Pharasma may be suffering from a declining self-esteem. People are doubting her ability to divine the future and do not consider her the prophetess that she was. Moreover, many are questioning the role of fate. They don’t believe things are as set in stone as they once thought. The people consider omens lost. Even some of her faithful no longer revere prophecy, as evidenced by the fact that “the high priest of prophecy has assumed a secondary role in recent decades” (Gods and Magic). In essence, they’re kinda taking away the Knowledge domain from her.

Conclusion
To me, that seems like reason for even a god to feel a little less than she has been. Therefore, she’s very protective of the cycle. Not simply because it protects the balance of life and death, but because it’s existence keeps fate turning and prophecy churning. She’s okay with the occasional undead, as exemplified in one of the prior paragraphs. But she’s not okay with doubt, with losing influence. Like most Gods, she wants to keep her position.

In short, she feels threatened. She may not be having an identity crisis, but she doesn’t like being seen as less than what she truly is: midwife, reaper, AND prophet.

My personal ideology on why Pharasma is such a strict protector of the cycle of a soul brings up some interesting notions about Aroden’s death, especially if you consider the possibility that she knew about it all along. Why does she allow her prophets to suffer from inaccurate divinations, and if she’s truly threatened by the falling belief in her prophetic prowess, why allow prophecy to be obscure? Moreover, if fate and prophecy are as strong as always, and Pharasma is just trying to hide something (which is another possible idea), what does that mean about Zyphus and his whole thing about “accidental deaths”?